Work In Progress
In the second chapter of our behind-the-scenes with the Worldtour teams, Cyclist heads to France with Cannondale-drapac – a squad big on development but struggling to compete with the big boys
Cyclist joins the Worldtour team at ParisNice to find out why success isn’t measured purely in terms of results on the road
It’s 7.55pm on Wednesday 8th March 2017 in the anodyne environs of the Hotel Novotel Macon Nord. An hour north of Lyon airport by train, this could be anywhere. Anywhere that is drab, tired and bristling with corporate types seeking midweek solace in the bottom of a half-pint glass. But for one night only, a dash of colour eclipses the grey.
In the car park are the flashy team buses of Sky, BMC Racing and Cannondale-drapac. In the lobby roam the world’s finest cyclists. Nico Roche (BMC) wanders past Luke Rowe (Sky), while Cannondale’s Pierre Rolland and Davide Villella disappear into one of the rooms that branch off a seemingly never-ending corridor.
The two Cannondale riders are focused on dinner and prepping for Stage 5 of the week-long Paris-nice. Cyclist is embedded with the longrunning US outfit to better understand the trials and tribulations of a pro team in the midst of a Worldtour race. The team was founded in 2003 and has been run since day one by ex-pro rider and doper-come-clean Jonathan Vaughters. Back then, when Lance only had five maillots jaune hanging in his Texan retreat, the team was a junior development squad called 5280-Subaru ( 5280 was a local Denver magazine).
Fast-forward 14 years and some would argue that despite joining the Worldtour in 2009, the team known down the years as Team Slipstream,
Team Garmin-transitions, Garmin-sharp, Cannondale-garmin and now Cannondale-Drapac remains a junior development team. Of the eight riders in France, four are under 25 – Americans Lawson Craddock and Joe Dombrowski, and Italians Villella and Davide Formolo. Yes, they’re flanked by experienced campaigners such as Rolland, Kristijan Koren and Tom-jelte Slagter, but even 30-year-old Canadian Mike Woods is a relative newcomer, having only taken up cycling after a promising career as a middle-distance runner was curtailed by a recurring stress fracture.
Investing time
‘We have a lot of slow-burning in-house projects,’ says directeur sportif Charly Wegelius in a heavy accent – the result of having been born in Finland and growing up in England. ‘It’s hard to reach where you want to with riders but it’s incredibly rewarding work. Alberto Bettiol [23] made big progress last year, finishing third overall at the Tour of Poland. He came to us before he was 20. Villella won a race [the Japan Cup] and Hugh Carty [22] is a very exciting talent. But with all these young riders, it takes time. And for some, that means coming to Paris-Nice and getting their arses kicked for a few days to see how they come out the other end.’
On the eve of the fifth stage, it’s not just the junior riders who’ve had a rude awakening. Cold, wind and rain have battered the entire peloton over the first four stages. It may be called ‘The Race to the Sun’ but the riders have yet to
‘We have a lot of slow-burning in-house projects… but with young riders, it takes time,’ says Wegelius
see any sunshine this year. Koren found himself in a breakaway in the first two stages and is lying 14th overall, but with mountains punctuating Stages 6 to 8, it’s climber Formolo who the team is working for.
The Italian came to prominence in 2015 when as a 22-year-old he soloed to a stage victory on his debut Giro d’italia. The result gave Cannondale a rare chance to celebrate, as the team seldom finds itself standing on the top step of the podium. In 2016 they didn’t manage a stage win at any of the Grand Tours.
That lack of success highlights the disparity between the Worldtour teams. While Sky and Katusha reportedly fund their seasons to the annual tune of over €30 million, Cannondale’s budget is said to be more like a third of that figure.
‘Teams like Sky have four riders who could be leaders of any other team helping one rider,’ Wegelius says. ‘It raises the level of performance to somewhere that’s untouchable for a lot of teams. If you have riders who are paid €800,000 a season or even a million pulling on the front for someone else, that’s significant.’
It’s not just the salaries that vary from team to team. When I wander to the car park to check out the catering facilities, Cannondale’s food van looks tiny compared to Sky’s vast mobile kitchen. This has no effect on the quality of the food the riders are given, I’m assured by chef Sean Fowler. It’s just that he and his wife Olga have significantly less space to work in.
‘Let me talk you through what we served the riders tonight,’ says Fowler, who’s busy washing up after the evening meal. ‘First, we gave them a low-residue vegetable juice. They then had a
non-gluten toast with fresh hummus…’ Stop right there. Low-residue? Gluten-free? It sounds rather like the latest diet trend among fans of Sex And The City.
‘The juice simply means extracting the fibre from the vegetables: beets, celery, carrots, apples and fennel,’ Fowler clarifies. ‘It means having less bulk in the intestine, so fewer intestinal issues. It’s also less weight to carry around, which is handy with the mountains coming up.
‘As for gluten-free, the whole meal was actually what we’d term “gluten moderate”, as we also served pasta. Why do we limit gluten? I know you hear it and think it’s a fad, but it really is an issue with pro cyclists. Gluten causes a small amount of inflammation, which for most people isn’t a concern. But these riders can consume more than 6,000 calories a day. They’re furnaces and are always eating. That could be a huge amount of gluten to push through the intestinal tract and that can cause problems.’
Fowler joined the team in 2009. After working in restaurants in the US and Europe, he settled in Catalunya in 1998 and opened his own establishment, El Raco d’urus. Back in 2008, he was out on a ride when Garmin’s Tom Danielson rode past. Danielson became a regular at El Raco d’urus, often bringing his teammates along to sample Fowler’s delights. Next to drop by his restaurant was Garmin’s then-nutrition guru Allen Lim, who suggested the chef might like
to come to the 2009 Tour with the team. He’s been extracting fibre for the riders ever since.
Race day
It’s 7.45am on Thursday 9th March. Cyclist heads down for breakfast, only to bump into Fowler again. ‘Last to bed, first up,’ he says. Being a team chef is certainly one of the most demanding jobs in cycling.
After eating, I head outside to find my chaperone for the day, team soigneur Josep Colomer. ‘This is a photo of my friend and his family this morning,’ he says when we meet up. Beaming from his phone are six Catalans adorned in Barcelona football strips with six fingers up to represent the 6-1 victory over Paris Saint-germain the previous evening.
Outside the team bus are just two young men, seemingly uninterested in football, who ask, ‘ Ou est Rolland?’ I haven’t seen him yet so I reply, ‘He’s still in the hotel.’ At that moment, an engine fires up and the Cannondale-drapac team bus, complete with Rolland, heads off towards the start line. I underestimated just how stealth-like cyclists are when it comes to sneaking into the sanctuary of their mobile home.
We head to the start line in Les Villages du Mont Brouilly Quincie-en-beaujolais. Today’s stage is a relatively flat 199.5km south to Bourgde-peage. Wegelius says Rigoberto Uran has more of a team around him at Tirreno-adriatico, which has just started over in Italy, meaning Formolo can ride here with ‘no pressure’.
Formolo wouldn’t be having his moment in the sun if it wasn’t for Andrew Talansky’s baby boy arriving early. ‘He skipped the race, which is fair enough,’ Wegelius says with an awkward chuckle. Will he get two weeks’ paternity? ‘He’ll have a few days off and be back for Volta a Catalunya. It’s a pretty rough sport in that respect. One of my colleagues wasn’t at home for two of his three children’s births. I left home four days after the birth of my first child.’
Wegelius now has two young children and warms to the theme: ‘There are lots of similarities between having children and bike riders. Seriously, it’s not to say they’re childish, but it’s a process of getting them to do something you want them to do without hitting them with a stick all the time. With riders you can shout at them and tell them what to do and that will work in the short-term. Probably. But they have to really try and only they ever know how hard they’ve tried. You have to take them with you – you can’t just push them along. Same with kids. You can shout at them one day and they’ll sit up straight and eat. But the next day they won’t. Or when you leave the room they’ll start climbing up the walls. It’s also f***ing tiring raising kids.’
Chasing the race
Then the riders are off. Cyclist’s photographer, Juan, jumps into the team car alongside Wegelius, while I follow in the soigneur’s car, stopping just once after 100km at a feedzone that stretches further than the eye can see. A farmyard and about a dozen cows are the only permanent signs of life, with pylons that resemble Space Invaders stalking the land.
Recreational cyclists are out in force, though, and one chap appears on a Cannondale bike adorned in replica kit. He cycles past but then, as if a fish hook has caught his cheek, he swings a U-turn and reels in toward us. No words are spoken – simply a point at his bike, then his apparel and then a Cannondale drinks bottle in the back of the car. Soigneur Alyssa Morahan looks at Colomer and, after a pause that borders on awkward, the transaction is complete.
‘They’re bottle hoggers,’ says Morahan in her playful Denver drawl, ‘although some races become a trade fair. We’ve had chocolate eggs at Roubaix, parmesan in Italy, wine in France… These water bottles are good currency!’
The soigneurs negotiate their way around winding roads, keeping track of the race and listening out for any instructions, but the flat
‘With riders you can shout at them and tell them what to do and that will work in the short-term. Probably’
parcours makes the day pretty uneventful. That is until, with 19km to go, Formolo goes down.
‘We were in one long line on the right of the road,’ Formolo later tells me. ‘I hit the shoulder of the road and then my front wheel went from underneath me.’ Until then, the only raising of temperature in the DS car happened early in the day when the Cannondale-drapac riders failed to follow Wegelius’s orders to get into the break.
‘He was angry – very angry,’ Juan reports. ‘Real riders really want to race,’ Wegelius fumed at the time. After the race, he’s back to his usual diplomatic self: ‘We wanted to be in the break but we weren’t. That can happen. They reset things for Formolo but unfortunately he fell.’
Still, the team in green (the garish colour was chosen to differentiate between them and Movistar from helicopter cameras) waited for their crashed leader and hit team time-trial mode to return Formolo to the lead group just before the finish of the stage, which was ultimately won by Lotto Soudal’s André Greipel.
‘That was a tough, tough day,’ Mike Woods says. ‘It was super-windy but it says something for our character that we brought Davide back.’ He takes a huge breath. ‘You know, this isn’t just my first Paris-nice, it’s my first race in France, period. It’s a rough introduction. I had a text from JV [Vaughters] a few days ago saying, “Congratulations – you’ve just finished your first big boy stage!” That was pretty accurate. Cycling is hard but tomorrow’s another day and I think it’ll be a good day for us.’
Sadly, it isn’t. The following day, Formolo has to pull out owing to injuries sustained in the crash, and Woods will go on to be the team’s highest finisher at the race, in 54th. It certainly isn’t the result that Cannondale-drapac will have been hoping for, but that doesn’t mean that there is no value to be taken from the race.
‘It’s an important thing we’re doing here,’ Wegelius says. ‘Riding in these pelotons, on these kind of roads is completely new to some of these riders. The point is to get them through it so they’ll be better placed in the future. It’s a steep learning curve but an important one.’
‘This isn’t just my first Paris-nice, it’s my first race in France, period,’ says Woods. ‘It’s a rough introduction’